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February 24, 2023

We Oppose Cop City and Stand in Solidarity with the Forest Defenders in Atlanta

As Antioch University Clinical Mental Health Counseling professors and students dedicated to community mental health, we join Emory healthcare professionals and Morehouse College faculty members in denouncing The Atlanta Police Foundation’s Cop City project and destruction of the Weelaunee Forest.

The Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), in collaboration with other developers, is clear-cutting the Weelaunee Forest on Muscogee land in order to build an anti-insurrection police training facility. The Atlanta Police Foundation plans to build the proposed facility in low SES Black neighborhoods and communities. These communities are already subjected to police violence, and this violence will only increase with increased police presence. In addition, these communities will be most impacted by flooding and runoff as a result of this facility. For the past two years, local activists have been working tirelessly to prevent construction, but construction has begun, along with mass arrests of activists, the unprecedented state police murder of Tortuguita, a 26-year-old Afro-Indigenous medic, and a flood of propaganda falsely labeling activists “domestic terrorists.”

As counselors, we witness the carceral state’s daily assault on the physical and emotional well-being of our clients. Statistics on anti-Black police violence and mass incarceration are ubiquitous, and “deinstitutionalization” (a historical shift from psychiatric hospitals to expanded prisons and cut community mental health budgets) is correlated with current states of mass incarceration, and houselessness. Police and prison systems reproduce racialized trauma for Black and Native people. Police and prisons protect private property and reinforce class hierarchies that generate wealth for few while ravaging ecosystems shared by all. The decimation of green spaces and safe communities (yes, the police make us unsafe) are detrimental to those who live in these communities and to the collective psyche. Police and prisons harm everyone’s mental health.

We at Antioch understand the APF’s $90 million Cop City project to be one of many US initiatives that unjustly puts policing before crucial community mental health services, a practice that can only be understood through the massive profits generated by policing and incarceration. We who sign this letter vehemently oppose any expansion of police and prisons and we call for their abolition. We demand that members of the Atlanta Police Foundation Executive Board step down and that all companies involved in the funding and building of Cop City drop their contracts with APF or APF’s primary contractor Brassfield & Gorie. Companies include Invesco, GI Partners, Flock Safety, Speciality Finishes Incorporated, Bank of America, Banyan Street Capital, Bloom Parham Law Firm, Cookerly PR, Portman Holdings, King and Spalding, Delta, Home Depot, Corporate Services Company, Womble Bond Dickinson, JP Morgan Chase HQ, Jones Day, Greenberg Traurig, Cadence Bank, The Loudermilk Companies, Cushman Wakefield, Dallas Smith & Company, McKesson, Portman Holdings, and Bank of America.

Antioch Clinical Mental Health Counseling Faculty and Student signees in solidarity with the Stop Cop City and Defend the Atlanta Forest movements:

1. bria g. stare	Assistant Professor
2. Cathy Lounsbury	Professor, Chair
3. Charlie Galloway	Student
4. Tim Peper	Student
5. Jessica Floyd	Student
6. Jessica Giordano	Student
7. Max Martin	Student
8. Felicia Walalis	Student
9. Beth Donahue	Faculty, Co-Director
10. Britt Orrico	Student
11. Jodie Horton-Piggott	Student
12. Summer Vineyard	Student
13. Abbi Kanouse-Schaefer	Student
14. Emma Bernosky	Student
15. Eliza Rosewood	Clinical Faculty, Program Director
16. Sharon Friedner	Student
17. Catherine Gard	Student
18. Amy Morrison	Associate Professor, Program Director
19. Karen Rollini	Student
20. Devona Stalnaker-Shofner	Associate Chair, New England
21. Ernie Zullo	Assistant Professor, CMHC Online
22. Lora Traffie	Student
23. Brooke Herr-Cardillo	Student
24. Randolph Cromwell	Student
25. Thearany Eng	Student

26. Elizabeth DeTample	Student
27. Crystine Goldberg	Student
28. Taylor Mason	Student
29. Julie Landa	Student
30. Jace Jamason	Student
31. Melanie Treuhaft	Student
32.Emma Conant	Student
33. Hope Downey	Student
34. Kate Kelley	Student
35. Lauren Pennington	Student
36. Sierra Colby	Student
37. Maria Gonzalez	SE CMHC Chair
38. Lindsey Bates	Student
39. Erica Munro	Student
40. Anna Hill	Student
41. Ayla Gustin	Student
42. Alicia Stenersen	Student
43. Elizabeth Stowers	Student
44. Erin Berzins	Core Faculty
45. Molli Lutz	Student
46. Erin Siegferth	Student
47. Austin Mabry	Student
48. Austin Hunt	Student
49. Leia Napoli	Student
50. AshO’Brien	Student
51. Toby Kramer	Student
52. Heather Tiszai	Student
53. Kara Tomlinson	Student